• Editor

  • Facial rig for easy face orientation

Hi guys,
I am struggling a bit on this. I am not sure this is possible currently in Spine.
So I'd like to have a face orientation with a single target bone: when I move it to one direction, the character will turn its face to this direction, allowing me to very quickly, and easily animate this => key framing one bone, instead all the bones individually.

So I have added a transform constrain but it seems this is not enough
Here is what happens when I move from neutral to looking right (everything is not setup yet, I'll deal with the hair and hat later):

So what I would like to do is :

  • first the elements on the back of the head (here, my ears, but also the hair, when I have them rigged as well) should move to the opposite direction. So having a constrain that move the bones to the opposition direction. Is that possible?
  • second, I would like some elements to be rescaled based on their position. For example the eyes and glasses should be horizontally smaller when on an edge when the head is turning. I have seen a post about this but it's pretty old, so maybe there is a solution now for this.
  • lastly having some rotation based on the position of the face controller. It can be useful for example for the hat to have a slight orientation based on the target bone position. Possible?

Thank you for your replies and advices.

Related Discussions
...

Hello!

  1. yes it is possible, see this video at 02h19m14s:
    Twitch: Rigging in Spine Pt. 1 - YouTube

  2. You could attempt doing this with the new stretch property of an IK constraint, or by creating some transform constraints to move the bones faster, therefore squashing part of the pupil, I'm thinking about this but the solutions I came up with seem overly complicated compared to manually scale the pupil during an animation. Here's an alternate thing you could try:

    Twitch: Rigging in Spine Pt. 2 - YouTube

  3. I don't quite get what you need the rotation for, but I did a very similar hat and you might find the rig useful:
    (there's a pointy version and a round version)

    Here you can find an explanation of how it works as well as the rigging process for the round version:
    Twitch: Rigging in Spine Pt. 2 - YouTube
    (expand the description for downloads and chapters)

You can download the dudes project at this page: Spine: Twitch
I recommend testing it out 😃

Thank you very much.
So I have created many transform constraints to handle the different parts of the face. For the rotation, I have added single bone IK on the hat, that also has a transform constrain so it rotates nicely.
I prefer not to rely on mesh deformation since it is a bit long to setup, especially because my character has many skins and I don't want to spend that time!
Anyway so here is the result.

I will need to be careful not to move too much the target controller so the character designer doesn't break too much. And it still requires some tweak on the parameters but it's not too bad right now.

Last part would be an automatic scaling of the eyes depending on their position. You have similar things on your dudes project, with the nose and the hair, but it's because you have a mesh with FFD, which I don't plan to use, so maybe it's not possible... is it?